Visual Anthropology, 17: 247271, 2004 Copyright # Taylor & Francis, Inc.

ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online DOI: 10.1080/08949460490468036

Unsettled Business: Acrylic Painting, Tradition, and Indigenous Being

Fred R. Myers
Acrylic painting in Australian Indigenous communities is one of the sites in which the conundrum of tradition is faced. While this painting has particularly challenged the conception of cultural traditions as bounded, its status has also been challenged in terms of authenticity; but I argue that a framework emphasizing culture-making is more productive. This article explores the scandals and rumors that have accompanied the movement of acrylic painting into the commercial market, arguing that the circulation of Aboriginal ne art creates a sphere for discussing what Aboriginality and Aboriginal identity might be in relationship to Whites.

This article is dedicated to the memory of Tjupurrula, the painter of Straightening Spears.

PROLOGUE I want to start with an anecdote about something that took place in New York, a few years ago. We happened to be hosting a musician and artist, an Aboriginal, who usually lived in Europe but performed also in Australia. The offspring of an unusual mixed marriage Aboriginal father, Dutch mother Jenyuwari found many of the conditions of living in Australia intolerable. This man had grown up, I understood, mostly in cities, but he had been painting acrylic dot paintings, authorized to do so, he told me, by his belated initiation into his fathers cultural traditions. All the more surprising given that his father had taught himself to read, gone to Canberra from their remote community of origin, and become a lawyer.
FRED R. MYERS is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, New York University. He does research with Aboriginal people in Australia, concentrating on Western Desert people. He is interested in exchange theory and material culture, the intercultural production and circulation of culture, in contemporary art worlds, in identity and personhood, and in how these concepts are related to theories of value and practices of signication. His latest book is Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art [Duke University Press, 2002]. Earlier books include Dangerous Words: Language and Politics in the Pacic, coedited with Donald L. Brenneis [New York University Press, 1984], Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines [Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986], The Trafc in Culture: Reguring Anthropology and Art, co-edited with George E. Marcus [University of California Press, 1995] and The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture, editor [SAR Press, 2001]. E-mail: fred.myers@nyu.edu

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As an anthropologist, and one whose research career has been conducted mostly in the remotest areas, where the privilege of learning about indigenous cultural traditions is greatest, I am wary about inquiring too much into anyones knowledge or experience. I certainly dont want to appear overly curious, inquisitive, or intrusive. As my visitor continued talking and he didnt know much of anything about me (after all, I was simply a New Yorker with some knowledge of Aboriginal Australians) the time came when I thought it might be polite to let him know I was familiar with many of the features of Western Desert sociality. This acknowledgement became a prompt for more conversation, and as I remember now it turned out that we had some vocabulary in common. This man had an incredibly interesting life, and how he had made his way so far in the world intrigued me. What I wondered, of course, was how much he knew and what his relationship was to the forms of Aboriginality that were familiar to me. How was I to behave towards him, seated as we were under the presumption of an essentially Euro-American event he the artist, and I just another New Yorker to him. What did his history mean to him? I struggled to hear the tones of Western Desert language in the English translations of his experiences as a child, rather as one hears the shapes of indigenous knowledge in Sally Morgans story, My Place [1987]. I remember the story he told of his grandfather and his grandfathers funeral. His grandfather, he told me, lived to nearly two hundred years! What was I to make of this, really? Im largely a rationalist and I dont believe anyone has lived to this age, but would I question this attribution of greater health to the indigenous forbears? Or would I listen and wonder what it meant to say this? He remembered the funeral. When his grandfather died, warriors arrived from out of the desert, armed and impressive in their demeanor. I imagined the approach of the formation of men bearing spears pointed downward, the custom for this sorry business. Was this what he had seen? And was his translation really what that literal custom represented? To me, it was very moving an expression of identication, an attempt to translate some deep experiences into a language that might communicate its value to listeners and perhaps to himself. What kind of currency is contained in these statements? What mythopoesis is taking place with tradition?

INTRODUCTION This article was originally written for a conference on Indigenous Tradition, to celebrate the opening of the new Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Studies in Canberra, Australia. What stakes might be involved in claims of indigenous tradition"? I remember back to 1973, when I began research in Australia. Jim Urry made it a point of honor to ban the word tradition and traditional from anthropological usage, insisting there must be more productive frameworks to apply to the problem of cultural processes. The Yayayi community, where I lived and started my research with Pintupi-speaking people, was typically represented, at the time, as traditionally-oriented if not tribal and by then only rarely as full-blood in contrast to the other principal category of Aboriginal

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presence, the half-caste. I recite these categories as a reminder of the eld of meanings or, as I would prefer to say, the eld of cultural production in which such concepts and categories must be understood. My doctoral dissertation [Myers 1976], To Have and To Hold was subtitled Permanence and change in Pintupi social life and not, as it might unthinkingly have been, tradition and change. My own ethnography could be positioned in relation to claims about the resonance of tradition because I have stressed a dimension of cultural continuity, the past in the present in Pintupi social life. When he visited New York several years ago, David Trigger took me to task for what he thought was too great an emphasis on this cultural continuity, and I recognize very well that what I have perceived in Pintupi communities does not automatically extend to communities where the relations with settlers and the state, not to speak of the Christian missions, have been rather more brutal. Recognizing the already considerable and eloquent works on tradition written by Bob Tonkinson [1999], Francesca Merlan [1991, 1998], and Beth Povinelli [1993], I want to engage with a line of thought begun by Jeremy Beckett [1988] when he wrote about the making of Aboriginalities in distinctive institutions. This step away from culture as context and towards culture as produced can be extended. My essay will draw principally on what I have learned since my rst book [1986] by an ongoing study of the circulation of culture, of acrylic painting in Central Australia and the processes through which it became ne art. Here my previous experience with Pintupi people underlies my study of this as an indigenous project that extends into a broader space, of business. It leads me to the question of what makes something or someone Aboriginal. What are the boundaries of Aboriginality?

CULTURE-MAKING How do we think about cultural continuities without reifying culture? This is a fundamental question, I believe, for an anthropology that engages with the present. If we are not only antiquarians, concerned to unearth the truth of an original Aboriginal alterity (however alluring that is), attention to what is happening directs us to Aboriginal cultural production, to the production of Aboriginal cultures. This is a production in which the idea of tradition an objectication of culture has become signicantly a part. Of course, for indigenous peoples of the Fourth World, tradition is particularly fraught. More important than questions of reication families have been torn apart on these grounds! It has been used as a vehicle for dividing Aboriginal people as well as empowering some. The claim of its possession, too, is a claim of survival, persistence, and connection to a past. It is, in fact, because such a seemingly innocuous concept can have such serious real world consequences for indigenous people that it is worth thinking our way through it once again. The Institutes return to the question of tradition is a response to a zeitgeist in which the disintegration of communities designated as traditional has become epidemic, a time in which Noel Pearsons [2000] interrogation of drinking practices and violence accepted under the sign of tradition

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(or Aboriginal way) and the status of native title rights to land, designs and knowledge gure prominently in public debate and policy questions about Aboriginal futures. Thinking about a cultural future (as Eric Michaels [1994] called it) is not as easily imagined as the once-promising frameworks of self-determination conceived of it. Although the topic seems self-evident at rst, it is a mineeld. So, what about culture? Looking at culture as the context for rendering the world intelligible is not the same as conceiving it within history. I have to assert here that we should always have recognized that even supposedly traditionallyoriented people didnt just have a culture. They certainly had a set of interpretive practices and resources, but however much the observer may gain entry to a world by learning the meaning of a sign, in actual practice signs dont just have a meaning; they are made to have meanings, given signieds in practice. How else do children or initiates acquire them but through the practices of those who have the authority to dene the signieds? It is not, as Ruth Benedicts idea of culture once implied, that people cant think outside their culture; it is more the question of how their attempts at signication will be received by others and whether they will be ruled out as meaningless by those with the authority to do so.1 What conception of culture might be required by an account of acrylic painting? A concept of culture that emphasizes the universe of meanings within which signs operate, or a system of symbols and signs, has the capacity to explain different assumptions that Aboriginal painters might bring to interaction. Such notions of culture might help make indigenous intentions intelligible, but they do not provide for the space of negotiation in which, for example, my friend Uta Uta Tjangalas insistence on a painting as a sacred object, might coexist oddly with his willingness to sell it as a commodity for $400,000 and then eventually to agree on $35. Culture tended to get reied in the salvage project, as anthropologists tried to understand the many different ways in which people have made sense of the world. This concept was especially important or meaningful for the Americas national cultural project (asserting the dominance of nurture over nature, the idea of a New World, asserting the possibility of immigrants becoming assimilated rather than racially determined). The claim that there could be many different ways of cultural being led to the conclusion of bounded even exclusive culture. But such cultures were never what people saw not according to the accounts of the American anthropologists Paul Radin or Edward Sapir in the early 20th century. What they saw through the medium of indigenous life histories and autobiographies were people making sense of things, negotiating meanings, trying out new ways of thinking and being. Sapir [1938] famously knew that one informant, Two Crows, denied everything that another Dakota informant had claimed to be the case. This is the import of Carlo Ginzburgs [1980] extraordinary portrait of the 16th century heretic Menocchio in The Cheese and the Worms (burned at the stake for the personal cosmology he created through the application of his newly gained literacy), as it is also of Clifford Geertzs [1973a] depiction of Cohen in Thick Description. Deploying the old concept of culture, one was guided to discern implicit assumptions, whatever the theoretical inadequacies, and those of us in the early context of self-determination articulated the ways in which cultural

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models mediated indigenous experience, the ways in which local models of authority as in my delineation of kanyininpa (looking after) and local notions of personhood constructed indigenous relationships with the government and other bosses along the lines of those organized internally. Recognition of such assumptions may be vital to the project of those, like Noel Pearson [2000], and Peter Sutton [2001], who have suggested the necessity of examining the implications of different cultural formations for the contemporary situation. But it has been more difcult to recognize that such models were not an invariant structure, that they might have circulated with other alternatives, their application depending on the interpretive authority of particular actors. Seeing that such a stew might be the cauldron of culture in Aboriginal communities is an important step, however much it might challenge the current folk view of traditional culture shared by many stakeholders in the denition of Aboriginal social life. Culture from the point of view that I wish to advocate one more like that offered by Geertz in Thick Description or even in the situational analysis of the Manchester School [such as Epstein 1967 and Van Velsen 1967] is not static. One imagines a range of possibilities what might be called an arena [V. Turner 1974] in which a eld of meanings is brought to bear by potentially competing actors, and any stability is sustained not by inertia but by authority and hegemony. I remember my surprise at hearing Pinta Pinta Tjapanangka my selfappointed elder brother who was so aptly named Buttery, given his lack of focus leaving a meeting where discussions had taken place, as he turned to me and asked what had been said. People had widely different perceptions of what was said, what things meant. Far from tradition simply ruling, they had their own minds, and disparate perceptions were not so much an occasion for conformity as for temporary consensus building. Indeed, the Western Desert society I knew was one in which the mandate for the regulation of consciousness was not very strictly enforced. When did it matter? Such has been my empirical warrant for recommending that we not think of signs as having a meaning, but of signiers being made to have a signied in social action, in elds of power. Young initiates may have no comprehension of the signs in ritual, or even be misguided until they are addressed by the authoritative claims of elders. Even then, as we know, there is often serious disagreement rather than consensus. This is not a boundary condition but the basic condition. My engagement over the past several years with understanding a history of acrylic painting has led me fully into the messy thicket of traditionalism. From the beginning, the ambiguous status of Papunya Tulas acrylic painting as art or artifact, as tourist souvenir or ne art, as ethnographic object or else painterly achievement has pressed itself upon every analyst. Produced largely for nonlocal and non-Aboriginal buyers, are the paintings an authentic expression? Of what? Traditional culture? Traditional painters? Or are they a product of nonAboriginal culture [Willis 1993]? Just as the one-time Papunya Tula art adviser Peter Fannin felt obliged to hedge his bets with the category ne art-ethnology, Vincent Megaw made this the centerpiece of his thoughtful 1982 article and the problem of authenticity pressed itself on the producers themselves, so much so that they insisted to me in 1979, These are not just pretty pictures. We dont just make these up. They come from the Dreaming [Myers 1988]. And like other

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anthropologists in the 1970s and 1980s [Anderson and Dussart 1988; Dussart 1988, 1993, 1999; Morphy 1977, 1983, 1992], I have recognized many linkages between contemporary Pintupi cultural production and that of the past. For example, the painters at Yayayi imagined the circulation of their paintings and the relations this involved with Whites to be subsumed within a single cultural model [Myers 1980a, 1980b, 1986], not intrinsically limited by the supposed boundary of white and black. I have conceived of such productions of value as a project of objectication [see also Sansom 1980], an analytical term drawn partially from theories of exchange that allowed me to generalize from the cultural specicity of Pintupi practices. As I have written elsewhere, the painters conceived of their activities as giving or making visible their indigenous forms of value to Canberra expecting recognition of their identity and a return in value [Myers 2002]. Exceeding (obviously) the standard rendering of the gift as a moment of reciprocity, this kind of giving is a temporary production of ones identity for an Other. Such externalizations of identity into visible form, individually or collectively, represent a kind of social practice that the painters aimed at their new exchange partners, constituting themselves as an autonomous presence in the process.2 But Aboriginal understanding of what the paintings mean has not been simply an internal matter, nor could any of us control the meanings in the emerging intercultural space where concerns about authenticity and tradition had dening power. If acrylic paintings arent really produced for local consumption, for ritual use specically, their status as authentic primitive art [Errington 1994; Price 1989] would be problematic for collectors who regard them as less vitally linked to the life-world of those who make them. Yet the Aboriginal producers do regard acrylic paintings as authentic. They are at once commodities and what Annette Weiner [1992] taught us to recognize as inalienable. Whats the problem here? Is it the truth of indigenous meaning and intention? Or rather, do we need a framework more suited to comprehend such processes of interpretive contest? You can feel the pressure in accounts to overcome the slippage in our concepts. Acrylic paintings have been challenged as nontraditional extended from ritual and other legacies of sign making into the eld of art. Surely, we might have said that since there is no concept of art (or perhaps we want to argue that there is, as Morphy [1998] and others [Sutton 1988] have done), this is not authentic, not traditional. It is something else. Well, it is nonetheless grounded in the subjective horizon of Pintupi painters, a directing of their signifying practice towards new participants. Even more, it has been pointed out that the painters were criticized by other Aboriginal people for breaking their rules [Kimber 1995, Johnson 1990]. As if these rules were everlastingly denitive and unchanging. But it seems to me that the Pintupi men I knew were never absolutely sure whether an action did break the rules according to someone, and they knew that every ritual step was dangerous precisely because some might claim it was inappropriate. Is it surprising that they thought everyone died from sorcery, in punishment for overstepping their rights? Can we open the boundaries of this culture concept? The meanings and practices of ritual performance, design, and mythical narrative are not causes, the absolute determinants, of contemporary form. They are rather but part of the eld

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of its contemporary production. For some, perhaps a man like Jenyuwari, their claim is as the Pintupi painters also sometimes said that the designs had been held by those who went before: tradition, surely. The emphasis may be on repetition, or continuity and survival, but who is to say that a sign grasped rst for its indexicality may not itself grasp other signieds? Who is to say that the only authentic participation in Aboriginal cultural traditions is that from birth, that engagement with the tradition of signs is not to be part of the culture itself or, better, a form of participation in a cultural community? To nd common ground between the so-called traditional and the contemporary as equally instances of culture-making is not to claim a simple continuity. The point is rather to insist on interpretive struggle, ambiguity, as regimes of value are constantly brought into new relationships. This line of thinking about culturemaking has its roots in the tradition of Pacic studies of intercultural practice, emanating from Lawrences [1964] work on cargo cults through to Sahlins [1981] and Thomas [1991] who have emphasized cultural construction and agency in the face of a world system. To this legacy of cultural study, however, has had to be added a concern with the power of the outside gaze to dene the legitimacy or authenticity of local cultures, of claims to native title. This concern with tradition is not, as Tonkinson [1997, 1999] shows, so much a fact as it is part of the interpretive struggle itself. Indeed, it is centrally a condition for the production of Aboriginality. Such concerns with genuine culture or genuine traditions echo a concern with authenticity intrinsic to the modern art-culture system [Clifford 1988, Kristeller 1965] and in this convergence, my story follows. In my analysis, I pursue the unsettled situation of acrylic paintings as forms of commodity and also sacred value in terms of the organization of distinctive regimes of value that distinguish market and culture as distinctive spheres of human activity and attempt to regulate the relationships between them. This is a signicant site of culture-making around the signicance of indigeneity.

LINDA SYDDICK: TRADITION AND BEYOND That acrylic painting presents a difcult problem for interpretation should be obvious. It is ne art-ethnology, sort of one and sort of the other. It is traditional and not really so. This shows quite clearly in the history of interpretive activity or criticism awaiting authority. Interpretation of acrylic painting has tended to be either (1) iconographic and referential (explaining mostly what Dreaming stories and landscape features are signied), or (2) formalist, asking what colors and organizations of the color plane attract us. When criticism has pressed further, with some exceptions and more often in the past few years, it has suggested that the painting is expressive of agency or asserting an indigenous presence, an identity, and so on. Vivien Johnson [1994] has pointed out how Clifford Possums paintings addressed a knowable White audience, attempting to reproduce an aspect of the Dreaming. And John von Sturmer [1989] has brilliantly written about the expression of self-realization in Jarinyanu David Downs. My position [1994] has been that acrylic paintings are only beginning to create their

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own critical culture, that they are not transparent, not reducible to a preexisting iconographic repertoire. But they are not simply open signiers, waiting to nd a signied. They are complex constructions that are nding an audience, making viewers. Otherwise, would these paintings be anything more than endless, if pleasurable and compelling, repetition? Are they something new in this new medium, however much they are also something old? The paintings are not just transpositions of indigenous design onto a new medium. They are transpositions of signifying practice, and only in grasping that do we grasp their particularity as well as their hybrid entanglements. And the problem for criticism, surely, lies in its capacity to engage with what may be new or different sensibilities a problem exacerbated by the intercultural, but also valorized, if you will, by the way in which the artworld attends to difference, creativity, and innovation. Much of Western Desert painting concerns places, particularly the places made in the activities of ancestral gures. But what is largely ignored is that, as Nancy Munn has shown, place or places are meaningful as tokens of social relationship, acquiring value by virtue of their participation in the transmission of identity [Munn 1970; Myers 1986, 1993]. That is, place enters into the life-world of subjects already objectied as a location of a Dreaming event and known as such in ritual and mythological practice, acquiring meaning in those practices. Moreover, rather than using this simply to demonstrate a generalized Aboriginal form of placedness, constructed so to speak out of a contrast with the West, such meanings should be considered in historically specic ways, as in the deployment of such constructions in Aboriginal image-making. Let me explore the work of a single painter in order to consider these issues concretely and in greater depth. Rather than picking someone like Uta Uta Tjangala, who is an exemplar of the historical cultural tradition, I have found considering someone whose afliations are more complex helps us to interrogate the question of tradition. The paintings by a Pintupi woman known as Linda Syddick, or to me initially as Tjungkaya Napaltjarri, do not fall neatly into aesthetic categories. The awkwardness of her placement marks, in an extreme, the unsettled situation of acrylic painting. Appropriately so, since tradition is always already unsettled. That Linda Syddicks Christian paintings signal her Aboriginality through the use of dots seems almost a gimmick until one looks more deeply into her deployment not of iconography or paint schemes but the practice of painting.

ON LONGING: A CONTEMPORARY ABORIGINAL PAINTER IN AUSTRALIA Because of her development of Christian themes and interest in Western popular culture, Syddicks paintings are challenging to the critical conceits of what might be seen as authentic Western Desert painting.3 Such authenticity has largely been understood as transmitting an understanding of the Dreaming and placedness. Syddicks work makes it clear that critical understandings of place in Aboriginal painting remain as limited in understanding the activity as were the former categories of primitive art.

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Linda Syddicks work shows what and how a place signies, both in its relationship to local Aboriginal identities and also to an engagement with wider themes of disruption and loss, often implicitly coded within the meanings of place itself as a social formation. The activity of painting, which she traces as coming from her adoptive father and is enabled by his giving her the right to paint his place, is an activity of recuperating identity. In grasping this, we better grasp Lindas artistry as perhaps the rst modern Pintupi artist in conveying this complex understanding of place, loss, and identity. Her paintings not only offer an example of this sort of construction, they also as good art should offer us Linda Syddicks insight into it.

TJUNGKAYA NAPALTJARRI Linda Syddick was the daughter of one of my principal informants and close friends, Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi [Figure 1]. Shorty was a wonderful man and a gifted painter, who helped me to understand much of what I came to know about Pintupi social life and culture. He died in 1987. I understood that one of his daughters, Tjungkaya, had been born in the bush, but she seemed to have turned her back on the traditions embraced by Shorty in moving to Alice Springs. In 1981, Shortys wife Napulu told me a story of the killing of her rst husband by a revenge expedition (warrmala), long ago when she still lived in the bush. Napulus husband was speared by the killers and thrown into the re.4 During the commotion, Napulu escaped with her small daughter, Tjungkaya, crawling off away from the camp. This must have occurred in the early 1940s in the Gibson Desert. I knew Tjungkaya in the early 1970s, when she and her husband Musty Syddick lived near Shorty at Yayayi, a Pintupi community in the Northern Territory. I knew her as a tall and hearty woman, who lived with this part-Aboriginal initiated Arrernte man somewhat outside the local community, with long stays in the fringe camp of Morris Soak in Alice Springs. In the early 1970s, I would never have imagined her as a painter. Imagine my surprise, to see two paintings by Linda Syddick in the Gondwana Gallery in Alice Springs in early July 1991! The two paintings were set up as a series and, I was told, they represented her story. The rst painting [Figure 2] shows her father being speared and put on the re, while she and her mother are hiding near the re. The second painting [Figure 3] represents spears men spearing the clouds and washing away the blood. That is, they cause it to rain and cleanse the earth. I was greatly affected by seeing these paintings, for personal reasons more than aesthetic ones. Tjungkaya was not Shortys biological daughter, but adopted by him when he married Napulu after the death of her rst father. That rst father was known as Riinytja Tjungurrayi, about whom I had heard in Napulus account but also in Shortys life history, accounting for his experiences as a young man who had hoped to have Napulu for a wife. I was also interested to discover that Linda (Tjungkaya) had made a name for herself as a painter of Christian religious imagessuch as these of the Ascension and the Last Supper [Figures 4 and 5] winning the Blake Prize for Religious Art. Apparently, the painting she did of the Ascension draws on the fact that men of high degree [Aboriginal shamans] were

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Figure 1 Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi painting a shield in his camp at Yinyilingki, Northern Territory, 1979. (Photo by Fred Myers.)

buried with their arms and legs tied up, which is how Linda paints Jesus in this markedly syncretistic image. Initially, I thought of her work as interesting in a number of ways, as an introduction of historical narrative into Pintupi painting, as an indication of how Pintupi people might experience over time the loss of a parent through violence,5 and as an insight into the process of becoming Christian, using some of the iconography of Pintupi painting to tell Christian stories. I thought the second painting referred to her state of mind, a Christian sort of grace, not recognizing initially any deeper specic links in the image. How little I understood the interpenetrating of cultural signiers and signieds. It was when I returned in 1996 that I gained a deeper understanding of these images, both as artistic communication and as evidence of the way in which place and its representations might convey signicance for Pintupi. When I strolled with an elderly Aboriginal painter friend into the gallery where Lindas

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Figure 2 Linda Syddicks painting, Fathers Body Thrown in Fire, 1991. (# 2003, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VISCOPY Sydney. Photo by Fred Myers.)

paintings were sold, I was recognized by the dealer (Roslyn Premont) who said she wanted to talk to me about Linda. There was interest in doing an exhibition of her work, she said, but Linda was troubled. Actually, I realized, she had trouble in the Aboriginal sense: someone had accused her of doing wrong, as a woman, in painting Tingarri stories. These are part of a class of Dreaming stories that are associated with the travels of ancestral beings who were instructing postinitiatory novices. The dealer thought Tjungkaya might want to talk to me; I assume Tjungkayas interest arose because she knew me to have been very close with her father and because she thought me unusually suited, for a White person, to understand her predicament. The dealer rang Linda on the telephone, calling Taree where Linda was living in South Australia with her current husband, a White man who had met her when serving as a dentist for the Aboriginal health service in Alice Springs. I spoke to her in Pintupi and to her husband in English. She had a story, she said, about Emu men who were perishing (dying of thirst) at Walukirritjinya, so they got some clever men to fashion spears (kularta) and to use a mirror, throwing spears into the sky to bring a cleansing rain. This is, I realized, a story associated with Shorty Lungkarta. It is a Tingarri story, part of their cycle of activities, but the key to understanding its signicance is that it involved Emu Ancestral Beings at a place called Walukirritjinya. This is a place that I knew to be

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Figure 3 Linda Syddicks painting, The Cleansing Rain, 1991. (# 2003, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VISCOPY Sydney 2001. Photo by Fred Myers.)

closely identied in almost everyones mind with Shorty Lungkarta. His father had died there, and Shorty was ceremonially in control of its stories and ritual. I hadnt known about the Emu Beings as part of the story, but I had seen Shorty paint versions of this story numerous times. Following his own logic of authenticity, the husband wanted to know what the mirror was, and Tjungkaya told me it was a tjakulu, that is, a pearl shell an item often associated with rain in Aboriginal understandings. As Tjungkaya talked, I realized that this story was the second of the ones I had seen in her paintings a few years before: this one is identied with Shorty and Shortys place or country while the rst, of the spearing and re, was of her rst father, Riinytja. The issue for her, and for her husband, concerned her right to paint. Her own country, she told me (I knew), was near Kiwirrkura, considerably further to the west, where she was born and from which her mother came as well.6 She told me that before he died, Shorty Lungkarta had told her she could paint his country, the Tingarri there. Lindas husband suspected that the jealousy of a sister had been the basis of recriminations of wrongdoing, but Linda was unquestionably concerned by it and insistent on the right to paint Shortys country, insistent on what this meant about their relationship. The emotional tone made me realize something in the paired paintings I had seen, a pair that Tjungkaya had insistently told the dealer should be a set, not separated. If the cleansing rain represents

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Figure 4 Linda Syddicks painting, The Ascension. 1991. (# 2003, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VISCOPY Sydney 2001. Photo by Fred Myers.)

Figure 5 Linda Syddicks painting, The Last Supper. 1991. (# 2003, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VISCOPY Sydney 2001. Photo by Fred Myers.)

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Shorty Lungkarta, then his fathering of her indexed not just in the paintings iconography but also in the transmission to her of the right to paint his country represents a settling of the upset of the rst loss, signied by the re. Iconographically, this occurs at another level of mediation: water soothes the re, cleanses, makes grow, cools the pain. The activity of painting, which comes from Shorty and is enabled by his giving to her the right to paint his place, is an activity of having a place and of recuperating identity. In this way, Lindas paintings represent a powerful symbolic formulation of loss, estrangement, and redemption. I had the extraordinary fortune at this same time of meeting Allison French, the curator of the government art gallery in Alice Springs, who had written a grant proposal for Linda Syddick to obtain funding for her painting.7 In order to write this submission, French had asked Linda and her husband to make a tape answering the questions she thought were important for the proposal. In short, she needed to know, what did Linda want? Allison felt that she really didnt understand much of what Linda had said, because most of it was in language (Pintupi), but she felt it was somehow important. So she asked me if I would listen to it and see if I understood. Beginning in somewhat labored English, Linda talked about how her father, Shorty Lungkarta, taught her his country, his Dreaming, and told her his eldest daughter that she would paint these when he was dead. Thus she paints Tingarri stories, the stories of the carpet-snake (known as kuniya, probably referring to a place, Lampintjanya, which Shorty often painted), and Gods word (Katutjaku wangka). What the tape was supposed to elicit was what she wanted to do with the grant and she said she wanted money for my property, for ngurra [that is, country, camp, or home"] here [in South Australia where she was living at the time]. Then she said she was getting tired of talking. When he took up the microphone, her husband reported that Linda was singing to her painting, apparently wanting Allison to know that something authentic was going on rather than an inauthentic money-making scheme. Singing would indicate to him that the painting was traditional, associated with ceremonies. He recorded what she was singing, saying it was mens stories. But, as I realized when the singing went on, what she was singing was the class of song=story known as yawalyu and sometimes identied in English as love magic. She tells Allison this, addressing her in Pintupi and English: Did you understand my word (what I said)? And then she sings more songs. She seemed to me to be redening the relationship between herself and Allison, reconstituting who she was, performing herself more and more as Pintupi in shifting to that language. Instead of being the supplicant, responding to questions in English, she offers herself as knowledgeable, autonomous. Her comments are intended for Allison. She says, You Allison, you are woman alone (single). This story is bringing man, making him see you (bringing you to his thoughts). She sings verse after verse and narrates the event in it initially with an emphasis on women singing to bring a man, because she doesnt want to be alone. Increasingly, however, Lindas narration turns to feelings of sadness (ngaltu) in the songs not just of the longing to overcome separation and desire, of love magic premised on the desire to be recognized by certain others. The narration describes a mans sadness at his distance from a daughter. In the account she is giving on the tape, she describes the man of the story as having moved away

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yuntaltjirratja wishing for his daughter. These are also probably the feelings that Linda is concerned with herself, having moved to South Australia with this husband after the sequential deaths of her children. Her loss, or losses, have been crushing a father lost to violence, three children at an early age, two husbands. Addressing Allison initially as a woman without a man, she establishes a common human ground, but one which she controls as the possessor of ritual and its knowledge. While her husband wanted to emphasize Lindas authenticity, referring to the songs, she centers herself and denes rst a relationship with Allison, whom she addresses directly, but says You (are) white woman; you cant sing inma (ritual), can you? This shows something important in her possession. Second, she denes herself as an Aboriginal. Finally, she invokes sadness. Tired, as she says, of responding in the terms initially established by Allison (about the grant, about publishing), Linda shifts the ground of the communication. This seems apparent as the tone of the tape shifts. Lindas concern with loss and salvation is palpable. It is the story of the loss of her rst father and her life being cleansed and repaired by her second father, Shorty, who gave her in his adoption and in the transmission of his country a new life. Unexpectedly, it is also the story of the substantial body of paintings she did of ET, the extraterrestrial gure in Steven Spielbergs lm of that name: the alien estranged from home [Figure 6]. She watched this Hollywood lm absorbedly, more then 20 times. Linda is fascinated by this movie, Ros Premont (her dealer) has written. Her empathy was sparked by ET longing to return home [Premont 1993]. These are the feelings homesickness, pining, of grief, of loss, which Central Desert Aborigines articulate in song and ceremony. These are feelings signied in and through places as Walukirritjinya and its story of bringing the rain does for Linda. And this is the story of Christianity, offering similarly a salvation from her loss and estrangement the loss of her children, of her father, and to some extent now of her culture. As Pintupi learn to experience the environment, places such as Walukirritjinya are already objectied. Shorty Lungkarta gave Linda the right to paint it, and doing so is central to her. The specic iconography of the place, the story elements of its fashioning in the Dreaming which are already socially objectied and dene it as a token of identity and exchange, takes on a doubled use which is part of its aesthetic function (to borrow a usage from Roman Jakobson [1960]). Jakobson describes the aesthetic function of any communicative event as one oriented to the message for its own sake. It is not only the possession of the place and the right to paint that establishes an identity, but also the specic imagery of spearing of the clouds and the cleansing water poetically reverses the loss of her rst father in the re. Herein, at least in part, lies Lindas artistry, in conveying this complex understanding of place, loss, and identity.

LONGING It is difcult to ignore the larger themes of how place signies at homeness or wholeness in narratives of uprootedness, displacement, and loss. This connection is invoked through the ET paintings, and it is a theme about place one also

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Figure 6 Linda Syddick, ET Returning Home. 1994. (# 2003, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VISCOPY Sydney 2001. Collection of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.)

nds expressed in the formulation of diaspora cultures. Linda seems to have found something of value in ET, something paralleled by the longing of the Jewish diaspora for the place (Zion) tied to ancestors, continually evoked and kept alive in ritual (such as the Passover seder).8 ET is one of several lms which have included also Schindlers List by Spielberg, a lmmaker whose attention to Jewish themes of exile and return has been pointed out by many critics. Undoubtedly, the Pintupi construction of place is not built on separation from a homeland in the same way, but in an uncanny and perspicacious manner, Linda has picked up on Spielbergs concerns in her art. Rather, Lindas painting suggests that separation=longing=recognition are fundamentally encoded or activated in the transmission of relations to place. It should be no surprise that Linda Syddick can formulate this relationship of place in her art. The sensibility of this complexity is central to Aboriginal communications about place. In 1983, when the hearing for the Mongrel Downs land

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claim on which I worked was held, the Aboriginal land commissioner visited some sites with the claimants. That night, the claimants performed an enactment of a Tingarri sequence to demonstrate their rights to the area since the Tingarri ancestors, known in this region near Lake Hazlett as Wirntiki, led by the stone curlew bird who as they passed through the region, made the country by their actions. The main performer, Allen Wintu Tjakamarra, was understood to have been conceived from the essence of the Wirntiki, and therefore was its real-life embodiment. The men chose to perform the sequence in which the stone curlew passes with the novices under his supervision through a raging (ceremonial) re. He looks back sadly to the country from which he came, his own country, and calls out Goodbye my country; I will see you no more. Linda Syddicks paintings extend and discern in painting practice a particular formulation of identity, loss, and replacement that must have had long standing in Western Desert life. Distilling this cultural formation, she articulates a more general longing, one we can now see to have been imagined more concretely in practices we regarded narrowly as love magic. Her painting of loss, redemption and longing is a reection of states of being and an economy of desire dened by Pintupi understandings of sorrow yalurrpa as the loss of an object fundamental to ones identity.

CIRCULATING DISCOURSES OF ART: BLURRED GENRES The concern about tradition, of course, comes from somewhere. The anthropology of indigenous Australia is partially constrained by the legal concepts and processes of land claims. Legitimate claims rely on being cast as authentic tradition. This makes anthropology and its interpretive practices complicit with a production of Aboriginal cultures that continues to stitch culture and tradition into some kind of wearable garb. In this respect, while the interest of scholars of and from the diasporic world has valorized hybridity and dislocation in cultural theory, those of us working with indigenous communities have a different problematic. I was well aware that my rst ethnography the last of the ethnographies, according to Eric Michaels would have an impact on land claims. This puts constraints on how deconstructed your concept of culture can be. The irony of Aboriginal acrylic painting condenses these debates. It acquires value (in the market) ostensibly through its incarnation of tradition and the recent and ongoing debates or scandals about its authenticity (dots for dollars) exemplies the power of this. Yet, I want to argue, its real power and lasting value is that it appears to be of tradition while violating it. This ambiguity constitutes its unsettlement. But this work must be seen as addressed to a present, whatever it brings from a past. Writing about multiculturalism, Terence Turner has argued that the current global cultural conjuncture has made for the steady proliferation of new cultural identities along with the increasing assertion of established ones [1993: 17]. Along these lines, the principal discourse of Aboriginal painters emphasizes their works as vehicles of self-production and collective empowerment. Such interpretations almost surely represent an engagement with emerging theoretical discourses in

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the arts themselves which emphasize, in the framework of multiculturalism, the self-denition, production and assertion of cultural groups and identities in general [Turner 1993:17]. Yet, as Fiona Foley has claimed it should [cited in Isaacs 1990], Aboriginal painting does so from its own particular histories and conceptions of collectivity and power. These differences, or particularities, are what make this work of interest to the artworld both contributing to its development of a general theory of such cultural activity as art and drawing on it for a historical frame. Linda Syddicks painting could be seen as instantiating the capacity for self-creation within a particular history having both transcultural and specic meaning.

BLACKFELLA=WHITEFELLA Whatever they might be understood to say, the entry of acrylic paintings into the category of ne art has produced a counterweight of suspicion in Australia, where the rough edges of the t between Aboriginal acrylics and ne art generate a concern about commoditization and evoke the constitutive opposition of art and money in Western theory. In her essay Culture Wars, Marcia Langton [in press] has seen the scandal-mongering as part of an ongoing and intensifying culture war in Australia, whose base lies in White anxieties, anxieties about the entry of indigenous culture and values into the broader society. This resistance to the rise of Aboriginal regimes of value can be palpable, but so has been the everincreasing visibility of Aboriginal cultural production. In August 2000, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Papunya Tula Artists opened a retrospective exhibition in Sydney, Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, focusing on the past 30 years of work. It received major critical attention and publicity. Curated by an indigenous curator, Hetti Perkins, and with approximately 150 paintings (from 50 artists) from the entire period of the movement, including almost all of the most celebrated examples of Papunya art that had been sold for record prices, this exhibition announced denitively the recognition of Aboriginal ne art. For my friend Bobby West Tjupurrula, the retrospective was an occasion for pride, as he said, especially in his fathers painting. Even so, at the Radio National interview [August 18, 2000] occasioned by the opening, the questions from Michael Cathcart carried a probing nuance. Was this really ne art, or was it just a kind of sentimental recognition of Aboriginal culture? Fred Myers, he asked me, whats your take on this? Is it fair to see this kind of art as part of a world-wide phenomenon in art, or do we need to see it within a purely Aboriginal context? Pressing further, the question revealed a concern for the authenticity of current Western Desert art. These probings so paralleled the suspicions circulating in the scandals of the previous several months, that most of us understood them to be phrasing that point of view.9 The next day at the symposium, Marcia Langton made the fundamental response: that viewers of Aboriginal art expect that looking at the work will itself reveal to us its value and meanings. Instead, she told the audience, responding to the paintings requires work the work of scholarship, research, and attention, just as we cannot understand Renaissance art merely by looking.

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Indeed, she said, her own understanding of Western Desert culture was not something she simply knew because of her Aboriginal identity but was acquired over a long period. How could it be otherwise? Or do we think that Aboriginal paintings are somehow transparent? A simple recognition of hybridity is not enough to grasp the internal life of culture. This lies not in reied notions of culture or even of culture-mixing, but in specic histories of culture-making. At the end of the events opening this retrospective, the Western Desert Aboriginal rock and roll group, the Warumpi Band, played in the art gallerys main hall, a space usually restricted to the serious gatherings associated with ne art. The words of their celebrated song Blackfella=Whitefella were an anthem to the mixed crowd, Black and White, pressed together in the new combination objectied in the acrylic paintings:
Blackfella, whitefella, It doesnt matter what your color As long as youre a true fella As long as youre a real fella

It isnt color, but recognizing the reality of Aboriginal lives that matters recognizing the emerging conditions of cultural production. And then the refrain, Are you the one whos gonna stand up and be counted? Here is an invitation that like the paintings nds new combinations of White and Black. Songs with the specicity of the Western Desert and even Arnhem Land locations of band members Kintorelakutu (back to Kintore) and My Island Home (Elcho Island) now circulate as part of a more abstract currency, for young Australians White and Black, in ways similar to the circulation of Western Desert acrylic paintings for other identities inside and outside Australia.

CONCLUSION At this point, then, I have learned to recognize that the men who attended the funeral of Jenyuweris grandfather can reasonably be understood as having been warriors bearers of social value, and to see in this resignication the everyday work of culture. Similarly, if we are to regard acrylic painting in the frame of culture-making, we will need a more action-based approach. That this is not an unusual situation is evident if one peruses the works of art criticism with the acceptance of Cubism or considers the processes of ritual socialization or evangelization in cases like the Balgo Business of the Western Desert: where forms are put forward and acquire their subjects, hail them, and produce new meanings. The concept of social drama [V. Turner 1974], or even of tournaments of value [Appadurai 1986], recognizes these reshiftings of cultural hierarchies as part of cultural life, not something added on by change. It is the recognition of the elds of cultural production that would take us away from the idea of people having a culture (or is it they are had by the culture?) towards the idea of them making their culture, and remaking it through the unsettled business of acrylic painting neither ritual business nor fully commerce.

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I want to end with my conclusion from the lecture I gave at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, celebrating Papunya Tulas retrospective, where I tried to explain why the circulation of these paintings has been so promising and so problematic. They help us as well to rethink tradition in a contemporary context. The hopes of the Yarnangu painters at Papunya, Yayayi, Yinyilingki, and beyond for new levels of connection and recognition, the expectation of renewed value for their own cultural forms, this is all part of what the paintings have achieved. Equivalence has not been easy to work out, but in the long view, it is clear that the original insistence on the power of their paintings has been borne out. The effects of the painting movement have been remarkable, far beyond what my early literal translations had imagined. I understood what the painters said, of course, but I would never have anticipated the effects they had in producing a recognition of their value and power across cultural boundaries. They have contributed to the accomplishment of land tenure security, of establishing signicant identity for those whose Dreamings they are, and they have made a kind of Aboriginality knowable to those who view them. In this way, they have evidenced the power they were said traditionally to have. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This article was originally written as a keynote speech for the AIATSIS Indigenous Studies Conference 2001: The Power of Knowledge, the Resonance of Tradition, at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), Canberra, Australia, September 1820, 2001. It is published here with permission of the organizers. Thanks to Allison French, Ros Premont, and Tjungkaya Napaltjarri for helping me to understand the contemporary world of Western Desert painting. I would also like to thank Dick Kimber for his comments and Faye Ginsburg for her suggestions in reading this essay. The essay draws on material and analyses more fully explored in my book Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art [2002].

NOTES
1. Acrylic painting is one of the arenas in which the conundra of the concept of tradition are faced. This arena is important to consider because ideas such as tradition must be considered in relation to specic elds of cultural production, with distinctive characteristics (such as those that the artworlds concern with authenticity and the market might bring). In this footnote I carry this perception into some general anthropological terrain for a moment, outlining the implications of cultural theory. I want to trace a particular genealogy for an anthropological concern with Aboriginality, a genealogy within anthropological theory rather than in the politics of Aboriginal communities. Perhaps it is a just-so story, but it represents a history of engagement with Aboriginal situations that ows from theoretical developments in Pacic studies. Cargo cults and millennarian and revitalization movements have been challenging phenomena for anthropologists. Principally phenomena of Papua New Guinean societies, the situation of local people building miniature air strips and conducting rituals to redirect European goods to local folks demanded an explanation. Were these the irrational wish-fulllment outbursts of primitive people, results of relative deprivation? Were these the consequences of colonial interaction, the products of a world-systems disruption of local systems? Anthropology in the Pacic in the 1950s and 1960s began to develop an alternative formulation to those explanatory frameworks that saw only disruption in the local from outside exploitation, only culture change inevitably in the direction of Western culture. In Road Belong Cargo [1964] Peter Lawrence made the elegant and eloquent analysis that the coastal history of cargo cults in the Madang area could be seen as extensions into the current history of long-held indigenous cultural assumptions. The conguration of the disparity between Whites and Blacks was organized through the body of available myths and rituals combined with selective readings of the

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Bible: when the boats came to New Guinea with cargo, the Black brother refused it or was tricked, and it was sent to the White brother to England or Germany. It had rightfully been theirs, and this historical mistake could be redeemed through proper ritual, through learning the ritual from Whites . . . or whatever. The point was that cargo cults were rational extensions, they made sense given the cultural assumptions of Melanesians. This exemplied a stance common in Pacic anthropology of the continuity of culture, of its capacity to engage and assimilate external change to itself, of the vitality and condence of Pacic cultures. For anthropologists, enthralled often by the exotic and the different, largely in the service of a project of cultural critique (that Western assumptions did not represent human nature), this was cause for celebration; their concept of culture had explanatory value and their hope for continued existence of cultural difference could be sustained. Indeed, it would be no surprise to most readers that Pacic anthropology found its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, with one after another documentation of cultural difference. As George Marcus and Michael Fischer [1986] have noted, however, by the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s, the outward manifestations of cultural difference were diminishing. Almost everywhere, people were engaged with institutions of the world-system. The instantiation of authentic cultural difference moved inward, beyond the surface towards what was known in the U.S.A. as ethnopsychology. This was a peculiar amalgamation of symbolic anthropology and psychological anthropology, attempting to delineate different notions of the self and the person. While for some Marcel Mauss was the inspiration for this work, I believe that Clifford Geertzs work [1973b] son Bali Peron, Time and Conduct in Bali especially, and later From the Natives Point of View [1976] and David Schneiders inuence in Pacic ethnography were central to this development. It was very American, this concern with something other than the maximizing, self-interested individual, equally a concern with the possibility of socializing different cultural kinds of human nature. That this took place in the Pacic ethnography is clear, and certainly in opposition to work on world-systems symbolic anthropology opposing political economy. The stakes were native agency. Even if people in these societies took on many of the outward forms of Western institutions and cultural life like Samoans, long Christianized [Shore 1982] they remained different kinds of person. There may be a precursor for this in the U.S. and in American anthropology: namely, the long history of indigenous life histories and autobiographies (the personal document). Native Americans had been the subject of much research, although their social systems were radically disrupted. What anthropologists discovered as different was their culture, embodied in their worldview and their discourse about themselves. What anthropologists discovered was also what both the U.S. government and missionaries found exasperating: they were not easily assimilated, but often preferred their own ways. Sahlins later picks this up more denitively with his work on Hawaii [1981] and also Nick Thomas [1991] in Entangled Objects. Against the Wolf model, Sahlins emphasized survival, continuity, and agency of local cultural traditions, but for Sahlins it became necessary to postulate something more than cultural continuity. His structuralism, of cultural structure assimilating new conditions, had to be modied with a notion of transformation. The problem for Sahlins was how to overcome the notion of tradition as static. He did not face the challenge in court faced by claims of Aboriginal cultural continuity which insisted on continuation of cultural objectications as tradition. More powerfully in a political sense, Terence Turner [1979] took up the problem of indigenous peoples politics and culture in an attack on cultural preservation and cultural survival in which he insisted one must focus not on cultural products but on the process of making culture. 2. Turning in this direction has suggested to me further that such objectications must be conceived as various within a society and not as transparent transformations of a single process. Following the theoretical orientation of my previous ethnography of the Pintupi [1986], I argue that objectications should be regarded rst as mediations of specic processes. For example, in my earlier study of Pintupi social life, I identied various objectications of the tension or contradiction between the values of relatedness and autonomy: in the different structures of ceremonial organization (patrilineal and generational, each offering a means of mediating distance and closeness), in the protocols of speech, and in the structure of the Dreaming itself its extension in space allowing for the articulation of spatial singularity (a base of autonomy) within a continuum of connections (relatedness). 3. For other articles on Linda Syddicks work, see West [1994, 1998]. I only learned of these writings after completing this article. 4. Napulu was a young woman at the time, with only one child. She remembers seeing a group of men: The revenge party stood there, a group of men. I said, Hey, theres trouble . . . look, an attack. His

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name [her husband] was Riinytja, Tjungkayas father. She was the only child, very small. I tried to warn him; thats how I tried to tell him. I stayed there all day, saw the whole thing. Napulu remembered her own actions in detail: I took spears, a restick, a spearthrower. Swiftly alone I crawled away, carrying Tjungkaya, crawling. I felt my way along. There were no trees to hide in, no scrub, only spinifex [a spiky grass]. They did not see me; I was lucky. What happened? I became magical [laughs], truly! . . . I tried to tell him. According to her story, Napulu crawled and hid at the side of a sandhill. From there, I saw them come forward, all those men, with spears. They burst in. They descended on the camp. I left a rabbit cooking in the re. It just kept cooking. I spoke to the child, Look out! Tjungkaya was crying, her stomach was bad, from the way I had carried her. I said, Look out, wed better leave. He was just a young man . . . The revenge expedition killed Napulus husband and tossed his body on the re. She remained hiding at the base of the sandhill, barely sheltered from the cold, while her daughter cried. They had no re. Darkness fell, but it was not until the moon rose that she went back to the camp, gathering coals to start a re. She made a restick and left, returning to her own relatives. The issues of grief, loss, and orphan status are signicant questions in my monograph. For detailed discussions of the multiple rights to country, see Myers [1982, 1986, 1988]. This was a submission to the Australia Council for the Arts. From it, Linda received a grant of $35,000 to live on, in order to produce an exhibition and=or book of her work. Faye Ginsburg [personal communication, 1997] pointed out how this parallel might work. Marcia Langtons rst response was to draw attention to what she called an excess of appropriation which betrays a policing of whiteness, and ultimately a trivializing of indigenous culture. But, she insisted, If you stand in front of some of these paintings, it is surely not possible to walk out of the gallery with the low-level apprehension of Aboriginal art that is now circulating in Australian popular media. It is surely not possible [Marcia Langton, Radio National, August 18, 2000].

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

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